My Year with Hookworms

For my son. I’m already proud of you, and you can tell me anything.

"There's a path stained with tears.

Could you talk to quiet my fears?

And could you pull me aside

Just to acknowledge that I’ve tried?"

-Scott Matthew, In The End

"And if they can scandalize thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life, maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into unquenchable fire: where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not extinguished."

-Mark 9:42-43

We Freman have a saying: ‘God created Arrakis to train the faithful’. One cannot go against the word of God.

-David Lynch, Dune (screenplay)

Chapter One

A beginning is a very delicate time. I know then that I will lose a lot of potential readers as soon as you are aware of the subject matter, so let me get right to it:

This is a sad, disgusting story, and perhaps no one will have much interest in reading it to its end. Why it's disgusting should be self-evident. It's about an eighth-grade boy with parasitic worms. Why it's sad is that the boy thought he couldn't tell anyone. I'm not here to assure you he was wrong. I'm not sure he was. 

This is not to say, of course, that any of the things he feared would have been justified, as I would hope no adult would. Just, I could not honestly say that the shame, scrutiny, and embarrassment he was afraid of would not come to pass, had he actually been honest from the start with the grownups he was scared of.

The lesson, if there is one, may be simply that if you have to take your medicine, you better stand up and do it. I mean that figuratively, of course. He would have hardly refused any medical remedy for this squeamish ailment, had he only had it within him to confess (and it would have felt like a confession).

Alternatively, and this being the lesson that would appeal to the emotion in writing the story in the first place, don't make your kids afraid to come forward in the first place. 

There are of course, events in this story that dwarf anything happening in the protagonist’s intestines, both affecting the world at large and his family in particular. There’s no thematic connection between the boy’s infection and the crime inflicted on his sister or the national tragedy that would prove to be the defining event of their generation. If one thinks that the focus of this story on such a relatively small and inconsequential gastrointestinal disturbance when such bigger and more traumatic events surrounded the subject is trite, even obscene, consider the internal experience of the boy himself. An ungenerous judgement might call his private fixation on his own gross malady, which was squeamish to think about but far from life-threatening, petty, self-centered, even selfish. Tiny, parasitic worms that provided no major medical issues beyond their own existence were hardly much of a threat in a world of rapists and terrorists. But it mattered to him, damn it. There is no such thing as true selflessness, because by definition that would be the erasure of personal identity. No one is less, or more, than their own self. If our own concerns seem trifles in comparison to others, this does not negate their importance to ourselves. This is, very simply, the human condition.

The ending could be said to be happy, but maybe bittersweet. On medical terms, and I don't say this to spoil the story, he was cured and completely free of parasites by the end. The bitterness is that he had to do it himself. The empowerment, if that's another way to see it, is that he was able to.

Still sad, though.

Chapter Two

In the author’s note to his novel The Brave, a story of a young Native American who sold his body to snuff filmmakers to leave his impoverished family with something, Gregory Mcdonald, better known for the considerably lighter character Fletch, cautions the squeamish readers that they may skip Chapter Four, in which McCarthy (portrayed by Marlon Brando in the adaptation director and star Johnny Depp refused to share with the American public) describes to the young man the precise methods in which they will torture and kill him.

In a similar fashion, I will let my own reader off the hook from this chapter, the most disgusting in the book and the only one that may be described as explicit, detailing how our hero may have contracted these worms and, more disgustingly, exactly how he discovered it. There will naturally be plenty of references to the parasites afterwards, but none so awful.

Should you skip this chapter, the rest of the story and the central character will still make sense. But if you are really along for the ride and want to be immersed in his experience, you have been warned.

There are some women who fancy they can pinpoint the exact night their child was conceived. The exact instance, even. They have their moment of ecstasy, their night of marital consumption, and in the morning, they wake up and feel oddly...different. Sometime after that, weeks or months, when it is undeniable they are pregnant, they would claim they knew all along.

I am neither a doctor nor a skeptic. Certainly, I would not presume to question or undermine a mother’s connection to her child, which must be spiritual and transcendent from the conception of a new life into this world. I only bring up the alleged phenomenon for how it relates to this boy and how he felt a preternatural knowledge of his infection in retrospect.

Our story takes place in a quaint but modern suburb in the Old Dominion of green grass, leaves of changing colors, and shopping malls, called Oak Hill, Virginia. Near enough Washington D.C. to be considered as part of The Beltway, but far enough that the soccer moms and Republican dads could go about their business and only grumble about the politicians from a distance.

In the winter, it snowed, and on days the children got off for the frosty streets, they sled down hills and threw snowballs, but only rarely made snowmen. Angels were aplenty.

The summers were blazing. The pools were open and filled. School was out and a boy’s fancies could be explored.

It was in August of 2001, only precious weeks before this generation’s fall from innocence, that, if his inkling is to be believed, the story begins.

He did not have to go far to get them. This experience would take him to the outer limits of loneliness and terror, but in the sinking of his stomach, it started in his very own backyard. Literally that.

He was going out this summer day barefoot. That was his first mistake, and why he would blame himself after the fact. It was a poor thing to do, for a number of reasons, besides hookworms, and he knew that. Hookworms were not even on his mind in this earlier, simpler, innocent time. Rather, he was concerned with bristles and burrs, sticks and stones. Not overly concerned, of course. Otherwise he would have worn shoes and, perhaps, avoided this whole mess, should we defer to his estimations. But he did walk slowly and watched where he walked.

He didn’t intend to go far, I suppose. Certainly not past the backyard, down to the creek where Spooky The Swamp Monster resided, and into the woods where the stream became a river with the rope swing and he and his older sister ate peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches. Rather, he just wanted to walk along the soft grass of the hill that was his family’s backyard.

Today, something was different about that grass. There was a dead patch of dry mud, between the deck and the garden. It wasn’t a large dirty area, and it seemed to have no effect on the grass surrounding it. About the size of a small pizza box, of an amorphous shape.

I do not know why he stepped on it. He did not know why he stepped on it. But it was deliberate, that is as sure as his regret was afterwards. He could have simply walked around, the easiest thing in the world, and maybe there would be no story.

This is all privileging his own theory, of course. This incident, such as it was, may have actually been completely irrelevant. He could have contracted the parasites some other way. Something he ate, maybe. There might not have been any reason to blame himself.

But he did step on it.

He lifted his foot up off the cold dry mud and noticed first of all the odd color of the patch. It wasn’t a conventional, innocent brown. There were dark specks of red and a strange oddish quality he would recall later on.

He looked at the bottom of his foot, which now was almost powdered with a thin layer of dirt. He felt weird about it. He didn’t like it. He wiped his foot on the grass and went into the house.

This was not all that long after, perhaps only a few months prior, he had learned about certain parasitic worms that could enter through the bottom of one’s foot if stepped on. That their eggs came out in the feces of dogs and such and were invisible to the naked eye, but would travel up through the skin. He had an uncertain dread after this minor incident, and when soon after he discovered what was inside him, would connect it.

But it could have been something he ate.

It was a large house. Three stories, including the basement where he made his horrible discovery. The basement had a bathroom, down a short hall from the bedroom occupied at one point by the au pair but mostly unused.

It was in this place, a few days later, he was irritated by an internal itch. He went to the bathroom and attempted to scratch this itch with his index finger. This caused some relief in the final moments before, before the horror, the disgust, the shame. He had not yet awoken into his nightmare, and was in these seconds simply addressing a minor discomfort.

And that was it.

When he removed his finger, there it was. Alive and squirming on his fingertip. Its appearance was simplicity itself. Just a simple white line, no distinguishing traits or features, the size, perhaps of the letter J in 16-point font, moving around of its own volition.

His eyes went wide and he instantly felt this living dread in the pit of his stomach. It was a cold bucket of visceral ick that would read visibly on his face. It was not such a shock to scream or even gasp, but he was speechless in his disgust.

He quickly shook the worm into the toilet, flushed it, and washed his hands with soap and water.

And washed. And washed. And washed.

Chapter Three

What he could not wash, of course, was the fear and shame that came with it. Nor the worms, of course. They were much deeper and he had no idea how to cleanse himself of them. He was completely out of his element here. He was frightened and confused. Guilty, naturally. He was a good Catholic boy. And he had no idea what to do next, other than blame himself. His thoughts went immediately to that patch he stepped on. Going outside barefoot was foolishness, and now he was condemned. Living, squirming reminders of his idiocy were crawling around inside him. How many? Thousands? Who knew how quickly those little things grew and reproduced? How could he have let this happen?

Not that he harped longer on blaming himself. It was done. It had happened. Now he was stuck with them, and the next step...

What was the next step?

Dinner was soon after the discovery. Chicken cordon bleu, which the boy disliked. There was something about chicken in general that made his teeth stick together. Tonight, he was in no appetite for any of it. Food now seemed less appealing, along with the world less bright.

But he forced it. He had some skill as an actor, or a faker perhaps. Children are some of the best liars, or at least holders of secrets. So, while he carried this terrible secret, felt this emptiness in his chest, a haunting guilt, feeling of remorse, feeling that he had just shattered a part of himself...he put on a straight face, a smile even. His parents and sister ate dinner with him for the first time since his world broke and they didn’t notice a single difference. They watched The Simpsons afterwards, and he even laughed.  It was the episode where Mr. Burns joined Homer’s bowling team. He always thought that lobster harmonica that Otto obsessed over winning from the claw machine in the alley’s arcade was neat, especially considering the role of that novelty played in the episode’s climax.

After dinner, Odette went to her room and he had some time on the computer, in the hallway. The family had three. One for father in his office, mother’s laptop, and the common one he and Odette shared, placed on a desk in a little nook or cranny, not a full room, somewhere in the upstairs, between their rooms.

This was before Google but after Ask Jeeves. The search engine he used (Yahoo? Alta Vista?) is not so important as what he found, which was a confirmation and clarification of the terrible discovery he had already made, first hand.

PARASITES. WORMS. HUMANS.

Those were fitting search subjects to get him to the answers he didn’t want but had to have, and it didn’t take long at all, even while he nervously searched while constantly looking over his back, for an informative website for all the zoological information one might want on the topic.

TAPEWORMS. PINWORMS. HOOKWORMS.

There it was. There they were. Unmistakable. Necator americanus. Hookworms. The resemblance between the photograph on the website and what he had witnessed himself was unmistakable. He read up a little on how they were contracted. Indeed, stepping on fecal matter that contained their eggs was one way, and he was now convinced that is how it happened to him. He had no interest in alternate theories and did not even consider his diet. This online resource, though it was very informative, did not offer any information on how to deal with such a thing. The discussion of the parasites was strictly academic. The website talked of humans in such a broad, detached manner they might as well have been another species classified. There was no inkling of any individual’s personal reaction. No empathetic experience to share with a little boy now facing the most dreadful medical nightmare of his life so far, utterly alone. Still, it was very useful to the boy. Now he knew exactly what was inside him.

Yet that was little console.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit 

Our Father, who art in Heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

On Earth as it is in Heaven

Give us this day

Our daily bread

On Earth as it is in Heaven

Lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil

Please protect us

And give us sweet dreams

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit

Amen

THIS WAS THE SAME NIGHTLY prayer he said every night. He did not make a formal prayer in speech that God remove this plague from his insides. But he did pray, very much, to be relieved of all this.

He lay in his bed, filled with fear and shame. He had no idea where to go from here. He couldn’t tell his parents, of course. He had never known any human with this embarrassing issue. No dog, either, of which they had none. His family had a cat.

He felt like a pariah. He had never been so alone. Who could sympathize? Who could understand? Who could even acknowledge something so disgusting?

And it was now, and it was only now, he finally allowed himself to cry. His eyes watered and he sniffed, as silently as he could. It was fear and it was sadness and it was shame, and it was all alone. He was being crushed by the overwhelming weight of this terrible secret. It was a secret weighing down on his chest even while it glowed within, like a sickness, which it was.

He tried to distract himself by thinking of something else, anything else. The book he had been seriously re-reading (as he prepared to move onto the sequels) this week was Dune, which Odette read first then passed down to him. They had seen the movie first. He really liked it, but was disturbed by a scene at the beginning, when the fat, foul, floating Baron Harkonnen had ripped out the heart pump of a short-haired, androgynous slave and been splattered with black, oily blood. He was intrigued by this scene as much as it grossed him out, and puzzled by it. The Baron hadn’t ripped out the slave’s heart, and he did not yet know what the heart plug was, so what exactly did he do? He was interested in the epic nature and dazzling mythology of the world (Kyle MacLachlan’s mystical narration and the Brian Eno/Toto score helped a lot), but he also had a morbid curiosity, expecting that scene to be in the book. It wasn’t.

It was an engaging read, and he would go onto read the rest of the series, as well as several of the prequels written by the author’s son. He was surprised to find that the Baron was a homosexual, something he hadn’t picked up on from the movie. The only thing he intensely hated was what he perceived as a bizarrely anti-male slant. He didn’t know why only women could drink the Water of Life that came from the sand worms, but that sex seemed elevated throughout these books written by Frank Herbert, a man himself. He also found the idea that you had to prove your humanity by sticking your hand in a painful box absurd and was repulsed in general by the Bene Gesserit. But there was much more he liked than disliked and couldn’t wait to see how the whole saga turned out.

But tonight, unsurprisingly, his mind was elsewhere.

Eventually, he fell asleep through shear exhaustion if nothing else, and faded into whatever nightmares that day might have wrought.

Chapter Four

The big question, of course, is why. Not as regards the actual infection. That would be a how and he already had a working theory and it didn’t matter now anyway. No, what the reader might be wondering, and this goes to the heart of the boy’s entire story, is why did he simply not tell his parents, and settle the whole thing so quickly?

It was simple. It was so simple